30 August 2010

"We define ourselves by our surroundings and our situations. If you are brought up in a neighborhood that resembles a rat trap, pretty soon you are going to come to the conclusion that you are probably a rat. If on the other hand you have got to the tool of psychogeography — or poetry, to give it a less trendy and more accessible name — then you can look at the ordinary world around you with the eye of a poet. Finding events which rhyme with other events, what little coincidences or connections can be drawn to these places and people. You can put them into an arrangement that says something new about them."

"If you have that kind of insight into the tawdry and debased streets in which most of us spend our lives, then instead of walking down a rat trap you are walking through cataclysmic history, from your personal memories to the local legends. Then the rat trap becomes a fable, a mythological landscape."

"just as living in rat trap will give you the impression you live in a rat trap, then l suspect that living in a mythological landscape might after a while give you the subliminal impression that you are at least a mythological figure. A heroic character in your own narrative."

"I think it would be better if we felt like that rather than victims of our environment. That would empower us, and put some genuine energy back into the streets in which we live."

"Conservatives, generally, are far more adept at politically reframing concepts by giving them snappy-but-misleading nicknames than liberals. 'Loony left'. 'Boom-and-bust'. 'Flip-flop'. 'Ground Zero mosque'. All simplifications or outright lies – but they worked. Like advertisers, the right seems breezily unconcerned about the truth of the slogan, provided it rings up a sale."

"The left, meanwhile, tends to respond by flinging back tired old insults. Bastards! Fascists! Racists! This is wrong on several counts. For one thing, it's counter-productive. Nothing riles an anti-mosque demonstrator more than being called a bigot. It's a grotesque, misleading smear on a diverse group of individuals – a bit like claiming all Muslims are terrorists"

"But worse than being insulting, it's just plain unimaginative. At least the right bothers to invent a new buzzword each time it wants to fart some monstrous new lie into the ecosystem. And they're often infuriatingly well-crafted buzzwords"
"...today's audience is too distracted to digest big lies. Now the trick is to cram as much misleading information as possible into a succession of tiny verbal snacks, inaccurate but memorable."

"it may sometimes be necessary to say things people don’t want to hear, but, in itself, cruelty is morally bad."

"the distinction the scientific literature makes on this topic, between argumentativeness (presenting the actual case) and aggressiveness (personal attack in addition to — or instead of — valid argument)."

STRAY SOD

A Stray Sod is an enchanted clump of grass.

When one steps on the clump, it triggers a magic spell and under the influence of this spell, all the familiar landmarks have disappeared. The road you walked upon is suddenly gone and no matter how hard you look, it can not be seen again.

In other cases, a traveler can suddenly notice that he is walking in a completely different direction, and no matter which way he turns, he cannot find the right direction again.